Kobro and Strzemiński. Avant-Garde Prototypes

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close to ultraism that was published in A Coruña. Not only did Peiper sever the Spanish connection, but he ended up doing his best to conceal it. What is truly important for the history of the Polish avant-garde is the director of Zwrotnica’s close relationship with colleagues Jan Brzękowski, Jalu Kurek, and Julian Przyboś; with artists such as Tytus Czyżewski (also a poet; the Spanish journey he took during this period left deep traces in his work), Katarzyna Kobro, Timon Niesiołowski, Kazimierz Podsadecki, Henryk Stażewski, and Władysław Strzemiński; and with Kazimir Malevich, whom he would accompany to the Bauhaus in 1927. In Huidobro’s former library—once one of the great avant-garde libraries, rich in materials from Central Europe but now split between Santiago de Chile and the TEA in Santa Cruz de Tenerife—testimonies are preserved of the Chilean poet’s relationship with Peiper and of the knowledge of the Polish avant-garde he gained through him. The library contains copies of Peiper’s Szósta! Szósta! Utwór teatralny w dwóch częściach (The Sixth! The Sixth! A Play in 2 Parts, 1926) (fig. 1) and Julian Przyboś’s Śruby. Poezje (Screws: Poems, 1925) (fig. 2), both with spectacular covers by Strzemiński, as well as issues of the Warsaw journals Nowa sztuka (1921–1922) and Blok (1924–1925), and a later title, Croquis dans les ténèbres (1944), published during his London exile by the multifaceted Stefan Themerson. Besides the stays in Madrid occasioned by the First World War and prolonged only in the cases of Jahl and Paszkiewicz, the only other significant Polish additions to the Spanish artistic scene in the years before the Civil War are Mauricio Amster and Mariano Rawicz, two excellent graphic artists, both Communists at the time and now completely forgotten in the land of their birth. Eventually exiled to Chile, they never returned to Europe. Although devoted principally to graphics for far-left magazines and publishers, in 1936 Amster designed the catalogue (with a prologue by de Torre) and the poster for the Madrid venue of the pioneering Pablo Picasso retrospective organized in Barcelona by ADLAN (Amigos del Arte Nuevo [Friends of New Art]), with the special collaboration of Luis Fernández; and Rawicz was the graphic designer for the Madrid architecture and décor magazine Viviendas. During the ultraism years, various poets of this movement appeared alongside Polish artists in many of the European magazines. Perhaps the most significant case is that of Manomètre (1922–1928), a journal edited in Lyon by the doctor, poet, and filmmaker (and occasional painter—consider his post—Óscar Domínguez décalcomanies) Émile Malespine, the inventor of two successive isms, Suridéalisme and Babélisme, which found no critical fortune. What was published, however, shows just how good the editor’s contacts were: Hans Arp, Borges and his sister Norah, the Belgian architect Victor Bourgeois, the Dutch

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